Are Short-Term Missions For Us or Them?
So, here are my broad, sweeping suggestions for what the future of STMs:
- Spend far fewer resources on STMs. Spend more on long-term development.
- STMs should have two primary purposes:
- The building of relationships across cultures
- The education and formation of those going
- Short-term missions should not be geared around service, doing good works, evangelism, and the like.
- Whenever there is a sense in which the group is being exposed to the poverty and suffering in the local community, be sure to leave cameras tucked away in a bag.
- Local church leaders (i. e., not missionaries nor the sending church leaders) should be the primary catalysts for inviting and organizing the trip.
- Local church leaders should be the ones the group hears from the most as the group seeks to understand the local culture.
- Those going on these trips should use their own money to cover at least half, if not all, the cost of the trip.
Technology Allows Multiple Ways of Communicating to the Masses…Does that Do Anything to Us?
Social media gives us a platform to toss our ideas out into an ocean of data, updates, and information and allow a wide variety of people to receive that information. What effects does that have on us?
How to Stay Connected With the Unchurched
I felt a little awkward because I knew he still had a big list of questions, but I looked at him and asked, “How much time do you spend in a normal week with people who are not yet followers of Jesus?” He looked at me, and then looked down at his food for an uncomfortable amount of time, saying nothing. Finally he looked up and locked eyes with me with a very sober look on his face. He did not speak, but simply lifted his right hand; placing the tip of his thumb against his pointer finger, he made a circle. He swallowed and said, “None! I am so busy doing ministry, I don’t have time to invest in nonbelievers.”
A Roomful of Yearning and Regret
When you have an affair you already know you will have passionate sex — the urgency, newness and illicit nature of the affair practically guarantee that.
What you don’t know, or perhaps what you don’t allow yourself to think about, is that your life will become an unbearable mix of yearning and regret because of it. It will be difficult if not impossible to be in any one place with contentment.
Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’s New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare
You know, we’re looking right now at a reality that President Obama has essentially extended the very policies that many of his supporters once opposed under President Bush. And I think it says something about the bankrupt nature of partisan politics in this country that the way we feel about life-or-death policies around the world is determined by who happens to be in office. I mean, that’s—that, to me, is a very sobering reality.
The more important a memory is to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the more often we rehearse the memory. And the more often we relive those memories, the less likely it is that they are true.
Orangutans At The The Smithsonian National Zoo Use iPads And Love Them
When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad back in 2010, he probably didn’t realized that the tablet would one day be used by Orangutan Outreach in zoos around the world. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo has adopted the “Apps for Apes” program, a totally nonfictional initiative that hooks monkeys up with shiny iPads.
They planned to load the goods onto 10-year-old Xavi, who they had stolen some 12 hours before, and make their escape.
But the animal let out a series of ‘hee-haws’ and unfortunately for the trio alerted nearby police.